The Girls He Adored

77

Before leaving the pharmacy, Pender purchased a box of one-and-a-half-by-four-inch Band-Aids and a nail scissors. Back in his room, he removed his old bandages and inspected his scalp in the bathroom mirror. Wong's salve had done its job. All three wounds had closed, no redness, no puffiness. Using the nail scissors, Pender took his own stitches out, rubbed on a little more salve, and covered the scars with three of the big Band-Aids, overlapped.

His next order of business was to write Steve McDougal a long letter on hotel stationery, detailing his movements in the last few days, and for the first time ever, putting a name-Ulysses Maxwell-to the suspect known up until then only as Casey.

Pender stuffed the letter into an envelope, sealed the envelope, scrawled McDougal's name and fax number across the front, and gave it to the desk clerk on his way out. “You have a fax machine?”

“Sure do.”

“If I'm not back by tomorrow morning, I want you to open this, and fax the document inside to this number.”

“You got it,” said the clerk, pocketing the twenty Pender had slipped him along with the envelope.

“Open it before then, and you're looking at a federal rap.”

“Wouldn't dream of it.”

“Good man. Now, can you tell me how to find Charbonneau Road?”

“No, but here's somebody who can. Hey Tom,” he called to someone behind Pender. “You know where Charbonneau Road is?”

“Way out in the boonies.” Pender turned to see a uniformed postman coming through the hotel door. “RFD-Remote Frickin' Delivery. What you're gonna want to do, you're gonna want to get back on the highway, follow 'er east for about twenty miles. Look for a sign on your right says Horned Ridge Lodge. The lodge has been closed about ten, fifteen years, but the sign's still up, far as I know. That's your Charbonneau Road-it's one lane wide. Loops on back to the highway east of the county line. Whatcha driving?”

“Dodge Intrepid.”

“You're gonna want to take 'er easy, then,” the postman said. “Unless they've done some major work since I had that route, there isn't a straight nor level stretch much longer than your car from one end of Charbonneau to the other.”

Tom the mailman had scarcely been exaggerating. After turning off the highway, Pender averaged ten miles an hour the rest of the way, and even that was pushing it. Consequently, it was well into the afternoon when he finally spotted the mailbox at the bottom of a blacktop driveway to the left.

He drove by slowly. Wooden fence, six rails high, padlocked gate, blacktop driveway snaking up through the trees on the other side. He couldn't see a house; couldn't even see the top of the ridge. Which meant they probably couldn't see him, either. The bad news was that he had a fence to climb, and a long, steep walk ahead of him. The good news was, he hadn't thrown away his Hush Puppies.

Once past the driveway, Pender started looking for a spot to pull over. It was another three-tenths of a mile by the odometer before he found a cleared level spot wide enough to park the Intrepid.

He pulled off to the side of the road, changed shoes, loaded a fifteen-round clip (supposedly available only to law enforcement personnel) into the SIG Sauer, and chambered a round before reholstering the weapon. (The SIG was engineered to fire with the hammer down and a round up the spout; a heavy trigger pull served as safety.)

Pender closed the trunk and started down the road, then turned back almost immediately, popped the trunk, and tossed his new hat inside. It had occurred to him that the white Stetson was not exactly camouflage wear. Of course neither was his big bald Band-Aid-striped head, he realized, but there wasn't much he could do about that now.